Nation: The Klan Rides Again

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Under a modern mask, oldtime racism and violence

The members are younger these A days, usually in their 20s and early 30s. Many of them sport hippie-style hair, Beards or drooping mustaches. Some of their leaders try to project an up-to-date image, sounding reasonable on TV talk shows and often wearing sober business suits. But at their rallies in the dark of night, today's self-styled knights of the Ku Klux Klan still wear white robes, burn crosses and spout the racist rhetoric of their grandfathers in the Klan's hey day of the 1920s, when klaverns across the country claimed millions of members.

The modern Klan is far smaller: no more than 10,000 members, according to estimates by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith and other experts on the K.K.K. But after a decade of dormancy, the Klan in the past year has grown steadily more belligerent and violent. Two weeks ago, Klansmen and their sympathizers attacked an anti-Klan rally in Greensboro, N.C., shooting to death four white men and a black woman, all of them members of the Communist Workers Party, formerly known as the Workers Viewpoint Organization.

So far this year, the Justice Department has recorded 44 Klan-related incidents, compared with eight in all of 1978. They included cross burnings, beatings and firebombings. A Klansman was convicted of whipping a white woman from Sylacauga, Ala., who he thought was dating a black man. In Birmingham, Klansmen were convicted of shooting at the houses of two black civil rights leaders.

At the same time, the Klan's membership is growing, up 25% in 18 months. Klan activities have been reported in 22 states, from Middletown, Ohio, to Castro Valley, Calif., as well as on the aircraft carrier A U.S.S. Independence and at the Fort Carson army base in Colorado. But four out of five Klansmen are in the old Confederate states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee and Texas. Most of the Klan members are blue-collar men with no more than three years of high school. About a third are women, usually the wives or girlfriends of male members. There are even a few Roman Catholic members, which is a sharp departure from the 1920s, when Klansmen hated Catholics almost as much as did black and Jews.

According to Klan watchers, the growth in membership is mostly a reaction to busing for school desegregation and to affirmative action, which Klansmen figure gives blacks an advantage over them in competing for jobs. David Chalmers, a historian at the University of Florida and author of Hooded Americanism, observes that most Klansmen have a resentful sense of being unfairly excluded from the middle class. Says he: "By joining the Klan and defending Americanism, they confer on themselves the status that society has denied them."